


Healing Touch

by nocactus80



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: Dentists, Dom/sub, F/M, Medical Professionals, Woobie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:28:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23738341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocactus80/pseuds/nocactus80
Summary: Sexual tension forms between a young man with a history of religious abuse and a dental hygienist with OCD.
Kudos: 2





	Healing Touch

He sat rigidly in the chair, staring at a particular spot at the ceiling he'd chosen, trying focus on his breathing. The hygienist removed the spreader from his lips, and handed him a sip of water in a tiny cup. 

"Is something wrong, Mr. Robinson?" she asked again.

He leaned forward to swallow the water and croaked out "Yes, I'm...I'm fine," still staring at the ceiling. 

He sat up fully, and swallowed the last of the water. With pained effort, he turned towards her, picking a point on her safety glasses to stare at of making eye contact. "I'm fine!" he said more clearly. She crossed her arms over her pink scrubs and cocked her head to the side, having none of it.

Her voice was muffled by the surgical mask, but it sounded loud in his pounding ears, concerned and annoyed. "Are you having an allergic reaction? Are you allergic to latex? Do you need an ambulance?"

He smiled weakly, "No, need! I'm doing great. Just a little short of breath." 

"I can see that," she snapped. Deftly, she stepped inch slightly to the right, into the point he'd been staring at and forcing him to make eye contact. His eyes opened wide in surprised and immediately looked down. She continued more icily. "I can also see that your pulse is racing and your skin is flushed. If you are in anaphylactic shock, I need to know what the cause is _right_ now."

She watched his shoulders drop with fake smile. He spoke to the floor, barely audible, "I'm not allergic to anything. I'm having a panic attack."

The room was very still, with the slight hum of work from other offices just penetrating the walls. The ticking of the clock on the wall suddenly seemed very loud.

She desperately wanted to scold him for putting her in this position. Had he bothered to tell her he had dental anxiety she could have done things differently, but that would have to wait until next session. Right now, her number one priority was deescalating the panic attack. Waiting a moment for his shoulders to suggest normal breathing, she began explaining how each processes she did could be modified depending on his triggers.

He looked up, his eyes pleading. 

"You're not, you didn't do anything...wrong. I'm not...afraid of dentists. I'm...it's...having someone so close to me, in my space."

The hygienist's brow wrinkled under her black bangs, as her anger became confusion. "Why didn't you say something at the desk?," she chided gently.

He looked down again. "I didn't know."

Puzzlement increased. "You didn't know you had social anxiety?"

He glanced up with a smile, and the looked down self consciously. His teeth were a mess, and the braces had only been on a month, not long enough to straighten anything out, but his quick smile was bright, warm, sincere. He had a certain boyish charm she had not expected.

"I didn't know I panic attacks from being...near..."

Again, the room was filled with ponderous silence. 

"Would you prefer a male technician, sir?"

He blinked, and smiled wryly as if at a private joke.

"Um, no. This is just new for me."

You and me both, she though sadly, vauging recalling a passage from one of her textbooks a few years before. A few more professional words were spoken, a little more calming and explaining and she resumed the work on his braces. He scheduled his appointment for the next month and left, and so it went for months without further incident. Then cleaning the his right mandibular band, it happened again. This time she was ready though, immediately getting all the tools out of his mouth and handing him a glass of water.

"I'm sorry," he said after his breathing was normal. "I'm so sorry."

She nodded and said "Panic attacks happen, Mr. Robinson, it's nothing to feel ashamed about." Beside manner was important to her, and she was proud of her tone: simultaneously professionally cool and, but pleasantly warm. She knew damn well that wasn't why he was apologizing. After his first appointment, she'd taken the time to read up on patient panic attacks:

_... identified several common themes including a perception of lack of control, avoidance behaviors, experiences of flashbacks, feelings of embarrassment, difficulties with the physical proximity to the dentist, the sex of the dentist reminding patients of the perpetrator, being placed into a horizontal body position, the specific impact of fellatio, the smell of latex, experienced lack of knowledge of dental professionals leading to insensitive treatment as well as victimization experiences, and the occurrence of disproportionate dental problems among patients who had experienced event(s) of sexual violence..._

"It's not your fault," she said emphatically as he calmed down, laying her hand on his shoulder. He startled as if shocked, and then smiled at her before returning his gaze to the wall. Well, that was a pretty normal sexual assault response too.

She returned to the work slowly, focusing, yet pondering the circumstance. Why did this only happen on the right mandibular band? The rest of the appointment went without incident. It wasn't until later that night, after her shower that it hit her. Her underwire had been digging into her, and she was putting some salve on the raw curve over her ribs when she realized...to clean the right mandibular band, she had to lean across him. He panicked when her boobs were squished into him. Oh no. His panic attack trigger was having someone pressing into his chest. She began thinking about ways to adjust herself over him in the chair without his body contacting hers.

Appointments six through 13 went without incident, or at least no incident for him. She felt unpleasantly contorted trying to lean over him without any contact. She was busty for her small stature, and it wasn't easy. She normally didn't think about her breasts at all. They were just there, like her elbows or her pinkies. Like her elbows or pinkies, they stuck out, and if brushing them was a trigger for a patient, she had to be aware of them. She felt guilty for being annoyed by his trigger, but it was annoying. She was a bit short, with big boobs and sometimes she had to lean over patients to get the right angle to work. That was just life. Thinking about how her breasts touched someone made her work oddly sexual and not clinical. One of her favorite things about her work was clinical detachment, the simplicity of human interaction confined by cool professionalism, so this was frustrating. It was, just a tiny bit, exciting? Mr. Robinson was only two years younger than her. He hid his fitness under ill fitting clothes, but he was hard bodied and strong. If only he wasn't...whatever it is he was. 

Appointment fourteen was a yearly deep cleaning. There was no way to not get "up in his business". The recommended method for dealing with patients with PTSD was to talk them through the entire procedure and ask their input. For Mr. Robinson she decided she would also explain how she would have to move around and across him and the chair to make it work. After he said he didn't have an questions, she finished off handedly, "I just don't want anything I trigger your PTSD."

He stared at her, confused. His eye contact with her had improved as he'd gotten more comfortable with her, but he still struggled with it. He took a breath to speak and sighed a few times before he'd gotten the words together in his mind.

"I don't have PTSD from something that happened to me," he said flatly, adding bitterly " _Nothing_ ever happened to me."

His features softened and looked at her with his boyish half smile, "I'm just not used to being this close to a, uh...another person."

That answer didn't satisfy him somehow, as if saying it made him swallow something sour.

His words came out in a rush, "That's a lie. I've just never been so close to a, " he paused looking away shamefully, " a woman."

Silence. He was waiting for her to say something.

Part of her training was to give PTSD patients more time and let them speak about their emotions if that helped, but this was weird. Her face felt hot and flushed under the mask. Was he _hitting on her_? Patients hit on her a lot. It was always unwanted and always creepy. She side eyed his face. It was stony. No suggestive leer, no raised eyebrows, just shame, like naughty dog getting yelled at. Oh my god, she thought, this poor sweet boy is serious. He's not hitting on me, he's _actually_ having panic attacks because he's touching a titty and he he feels so bad he's _confessing_ it. What sort of level of abuse survivor behavior was this? There was not a chapter her ethics course about how to deal with this, which meant she had to wing it. She hated winging it. If she told him how inappropriate it was to tell her that she was going to break his stupid, earnest heart and give him more shame about whatever he went through, but if she didn't then she was going to have him thinking it's normal to tell a medical worker that her body is bad for giving you the vapors. I don't get paid enough to be a therapist, she thought. Nothing in my ethics class covered this! Say something professional!

"It's fine, OK?," she improvised. "Lots of my patients like me near them because I put a lot of effort into my bedside manner. I do that because being near them is an important part of my job and I take a lot a pride in my job. We all have a job here: My job is to be a good hygienist and your job is to be a good patient. We're all just doing our jobs and no one needs to feel weird about it."

He nodded, considering it and seemed visibly calmer. Appointment fourteen ended an hour later without incident, other than her catching him looking at her face and then looking away when she noticed. She couldn't stop thinking about him. How in the world has a 20 year old man never been near a woman before? Was he lying? Was he serious about "nothing" happening to him? Why the panic, then? Really it was none of her business, but there was something about this guy. She decided to push the limits of acceptable pre-appointment conversations and find out all she could about him.

Every month he would show up, and she would ask him as many questions as she reasonably could, in the stilted dialog of dental workers everywhere:

Her: So did you grow up around here?

Him: Gaogihoeg hgaeuoghao feaah

Her: Open wider, please. Oh, what part of Illinois?

Him: Agheuiog ghuiohe

Her: Head back. My grandparents live near there!

Braces are long term project, and so it was the two got to know each other pretty well in year two. It took several months for her to even realize that she was attracted to him, though she couldn't say why. She usually dated urban professional types: doctors, attorneys, even a colonel once. These woobies and country boys did nothing for her, but there was something about his desperate earnestness, that just pulled her in. And then there was was is bizarre...responsiveness. From time to time she would forget to do her awkward bridge over the arm rests and her breasts would press into him. She wouldn't even notice, accept it made his breath catch instantly. She'd apologize immediately and push back up off the chair.

"Nah Uhm sooahy," he'd say every time, his brown eyes big and sad and kind at the same time. 

On one hand it was so pathetic, but on the other having that sort of power over a man was a rush. She'd suspected that she'd been "the other woman" a few times, expected to show up and respond nearly on command. It never made sense to her. Now she understood the appeal. having such ownership of someone else was _fun_. She found herself struggling more and more with touching him in a sort of accidentally-on-purpose way, after giving his arm a friendly, reassuring squeeze and watching him blush crimson. As the appointments went on, she learned the entire details of the life story she could ask about at work, but she took professionalism very seriously. 

It took her several months of dropping hints about how it was possible for them to go out, she'd just request a different hygienist for him. A taller, less boobilicious one, she thought to herself, but he didn't get it. She started to wonder if the whole "never being close to a woman" thing was because he was stupid? So it happened that his cleaning was the day after a particularly unpleasant date for her. Something about the idea of training a clueless man seemed uniquely appealing that day.

She waited until the end of his appointment (the 25th of 48). "Mr. Robinson, you don't seem to have panic attacks anymore."

He smiled, his smile looking much better. "Yeah, I'm pretty comfortable with you."

She smiled back, through all the safety gear. 

"So, I was thinking, "she began, "Do you remember me saying that if you were comfortable switching to one of the other hygienists, you and I could go out?"

He smiled, warmly, but obviously confused. "Of course, yeah." 

"So, I'd really like you to ask me out on a date, I can't accept if I'm your regular provider."

He blinked, the gears turning. 

"You're telling me to switch my hygienist, so we can go out sometime?" he asked.

She laughed out loud. "Close. I'm telling you I can arrange for you to have a different hygienist...if you ask me out."

He was still visibly confused. My god could he really be this dense, she thought.

"I want you to ask me out. You should do that, now, when I'm done talking and I'll take care of the rest."

He almost jumped, his face in huge wide smile, "OH!" 

He blatantly read her name tag. "Morgan.. would you like to go out sometime?"

She sighed internally. Why are the pretty ones always so dumb?

"Yes." Normally she would have stopped there and let the guy do all the footwork, but she wasn't risking it with this goofus. "I have Saturday off. Let's do coffee...at 9 am...at the Starbucks... on Van Bruen across from the bank." she said, carefully hiding the weariness in her voice. It was like giving instructions to a child, she thought, slightly beginning to regret this idea. 

His head nodded, the short nods of man listening to something very serious. 

"Yes. Got it. Can I get your number?" he asked. He reached into a his pocket, but instead of a phone grabbed a tiny leather bound notebook and an old fashioned pen, writing the date and number in flowing blue cursive loops. Blowing on it to dry the ink, he smiled at her and said, "Don't worry! I'll transfer it to my day planner and Rolodex when I get home." 

He thinks I look worried because I thought he wouldn't transfer it to his Rolodex instead of because he's fell through a hole from 1926. Oooooohkay, she thought. The fact he was oblivious to his well intentioned response highlighting more weirdness rather than less, got her to laugh at loud.

She watched him leave, half the smile still on her face. His frame was well cut under the odd, baggy clothes: his shoulder broad, his waist narrow, and that smile. That sweet, sincere "we have a secret!" smile. He seemed like such sweet, hot guy. Could she work through all the weirdness though?


End file.
